[spankalee]

People have had some huge understandings of what's actually going on:

- That Mason opening issues means that it's a Google-effort. It's not.

- That the "Should we remove..." issue for community feedback. It's not. Spec issues are a collaboration vehicle for spec maintainers. There's not enough of the community on GitHub for that to be a good feedback mechanism.

- That Mason or Google hide comments and locked the thread. I heard from good authority that it was Apple employees actually, in their role as spec repo admins.

- That Google brought up the idea. The best I can see from meeting minutes is that a Mozilla rep did this time, though it's been brought up occasionally for 10 years at least.

- That the spec PR will be merged. At this point the PR is to show what it would mean to move XSLT from the spec.

- That decision has been made. These things are the beginning of the process.

- That XSLT even can be removed. Even though the vendors are tentatively in support, they are fully aware that this might not be viable in practice. I would guess that they think they can remove it, but they don't know for sure. They know usage numbers aren't always accurate, and they have ways of hedging bets like flags with different default in different channels, enterprise policies, reverse origin trials, etc.

[xg15]

A lot of that is irrelevant though. I don't think the problem is that Google might have unilaterally decided this, the problem is that there are unilateral decisions of this kind at all for a tech that affects billions of people.

(And I'm counting agreement between the handful of browser vendors as unilateral decisions as well. The group is not exactly very large)

The second part was basically the author saying "calm down guys, relax, there is a process." - and then speculating what that process might be.

If there is an orderly, public process that is being followed here, that includes a time and place for community feedback, shouldn't you be able to read up on it somewhere instead of speculating?

[riedel]

I would agree to see the outcry more as a symptom about this meritocratic system. I think we are at a point where new browser/rendering engines are developing like ladybird or Servo. An independent group should make sure that they will strive. Making specs simpler can help here. But I think many things are done for the wrong reasons (E.g. Google wanting to cut down cost on parts irrelevant to their income, other vendors that are reliant on them).

Last time I used XSLT in the browser was actually transforming PMML to JavaScript executable ML models about 10 yrs ago. Before that I think it was building a light weight web frontend for our SVN repo. With XML APIs replaced by json or binary formats, the relevance is becoming less and less. And in the end it is about legacy stuff only because there are XSLT compilers [0] that could fill the gap (maybe with a small web extension, that won't work on phones with native Apple and Google browsers...)

[0] https://github.com/egh/xjslt

[xg15]

Yeah, I was surprised so many people were caring about XSLT. As a language it really isn't very good and I wasn't aware it was used in a meaningful fashion at all.

(Still, it always felt like a glimpse into an alternative, much less hackish processing model for the web, where you just have DOM trees and a pipeline of pure functions to transform them into different trees. I think that approach is still worth exploring and a lot of more recent tech, like React does it)

But I feel the backlash is more a symptom of how the web platform is ran in general.